Stop crashes on your Mac

Whenever your system crashes or a program unexpectedly quits, no  matter what type of error message you get or whether you get one at all, there are some likely remedies. 

1. Restart your Mac. After almost any system crash, you have to restart. The point is that restarting may turn out to be the solution to your problem. The error may never return. If it does, try another technique. 

2. Check for extension conflicts. Extension problems are probably the single biggest cause of system errors. The standard conflict- checking technique is to disable all extensions by holding down  the [shift] key during startup. If the system error disappears, it's time to find out which extension was causing the error. For this task, we recommend investing in a utility such as Now Utilities' Startup Manager of Casady & Greene's Conflict Catcher 

3. They make diagnosing extension conflicts almost fun (well, at least bearable). Once you find the culprit, disable it and wait for the bug fix from the maker of the extension. 

4. Repair the disk. Utilities such as Apple's Disk First Aid, Symantec's Norton Utilities, and Symantec's MacTools Pro tell you if you have a disk problem and then repair it. 4. Reinstall corrupted files. A program that consistently crashes is a sign of a corrupted file. Consider reinstalling the program. Don't forget to first delete the program's preferences file, so that those get reinstalled too. If all else fails, reinstall the system software. Even if these tricks don't work, you don't have to admit defeat yet. Summon all your tenacity and get a book of Mac software-based repairs. It can give you a much longer list of solutions to try before you haul your Mac into the repair shop. 

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